The secret, oddly enough, is the tray.
I explicate:
You get 56 cubes (not dice, cubes – wait for it). There are three kinds of cubes (well, four, if you count the Cobra cubes): Ankhs, Cranes and Eyes – in four different colors. And you put the cubes in the tray, stacking them until you get a pyramid. And the thing is, stacking them is, like, a no-brainer. No steadiness of hand or acuity of eye is required because of the tray. You kind of just pour, so to speak, the cubes into the tray and they stack, as it were, themselves.
So why are these cubes and not dice? Because every side is the same, only the cubes are different. See, not dice. Cubes.
The game is all about removing the cubes, which also works in a lovely and endearing-like manner. You can remove any cube as long as: two or three sides are visible, it isn’t touching a Cobra cube, and removing it doesn’t result in an empty space in the tray. If you look at the pyramid a little more closely (which you will be doing, a lot), you’ll notice that there are generally speaking an ample number of cubes for the picking, some of which at the near bottom of a whole line of cubes. And when you take one of those away, the cubes on the top all slide down, revealing yet more possibilities, or perhaps another Cobra.
Every cube you remove is worth points: the Eyes are worth three, the Cranes two and the Ankhs one. The Cobras aren’t worth anything, which doesn’t matter because you can’t remove them anyway. So, strategically speaking, the Eyes have it.
When all legally removable cubes have been collected, the game is over. You remove any Cobras and any Cobra-adjacent cubes from the tray, count all the cubes you have of the same color – the color, not the kind. And the player who has the most of a particular color gets to claim all the cubes of that color that are in the tray as hers. So, strategically speaking, you most definitely want to be collecting cubes of a particular color while you’re also trying to collect cubes of a the higher-scoring kind.
You’re going to be spending a lot of your time turning the pyramid around, inspecting every side, and appreciating how easily the base turns.
It all turns out, as it were, to present a challenge that is easy enough for an eight-year-old to understand, and rife enough with strategic implications to entice serious contemplation by your resident contemplators.
Suffice it to say: fun-wise, what we’re looking at here is major.
